The crash landing was completely and utterly normal. I say this primarily because I didn't particularly remember any of it. Imagine the shock of suddenly having your spinal cord severed, your neck chopped off, your head separate from your body - and yet somehow, somehow, you survive. You have no senses, no feeling, no proprioception, but you're alive, somehow, floating in an abyss that's not an abyss, because it's close. It's not vast and endless, it's there, touching you, brushing against your face like rough gauze. It's nothing and everything. Many non-pilots don't seem to get it, or they do get it in an intellectual way, or worse, a poetic way, where the mech is your *soul and body and heart and - * No. It's not a soul or a heart. It just - is. It's a body, like your own. The hydraulics replace the wooshing of blood and the thrum of the circulating allotrope generator replaces the heartbeat. The brain doesn't like two hearts beating at once, two nervous systems competing for attention. You have to choose one. When you crash, and I mean hard crash, when the stupid neural link connector in the back of your neck that's held in only by two pathetic plastic latches comes undone - it's ripped away without warning, gone, stolen in a fraction of a second. You don't have time to adjust, don't have time to switch back to your flesh. As far as your brain (and you) are concerned, your body is just - evaporated. Gone. No nerves, no skin, no blood to pump, no muscles to flex, no air to breathe. There's an implant, a little chip in the top of your spinal column, that does these things for you when you're in the mech - and when you've been ripped out of one. It has a battery life of approximately 78 hours after disconnection. So you sit there, in the close, suffocating darkness, and you try and find your flesh again. It's hard. It's also not something you can do consciously. And all the while, you try and figure out what time it is. That's the worst part. A clock, even a mental one, is based on the movement of particles, on the way that atoms move and shift. The only track of time you have is thoughts. How quickly do you think? That's what I tried to figure out first. I thought of differential equations and tried to solve them as quickly as I could, sans scratch paper, referencing that with my poorly-remembered test scores and times. It was in the midst of a particularly fierce integral that I found my flesh again.
The main thing it entailed was pain. Sheer and utter pain, arcing through my old-new nerves like a energy substation after a missile attack. I was thankful to find that I was not badly injured. I was less thankful to find that it was 74 hours after my crash, and I was incredibly, incredibly thirsty, with a small side of hunger to help. It was bad, yes, but it could be worse. I dragged myself out of the cockpit and fell the approximately 2 meters to the forest floor. My legs were, if not shattered, then aching and bruised. What little rations I had were still in the cockpit, which I had stupidly fallen out of and now had no way to reach. I curled into a ball and prepared to die. It was odd, really. A different kind of darkness than before. I understood, now, why people said darkness and death and unconsciousness was a deep abyss. It was... falling. Endlessly.
I woke up in a small, pathetic hospital room, IVs in my veins and a small plastic oxygen mask over my nose. The floor was a warm, off-white linoleum, and the walls were painted in perhaps the most carelessly chosen shade of off-blue possible. The fluid and nutrition bags hung like corpses from awkward metal stands that looked as if they had been dumped in the sea for five years before being fished out. The mask was the first thing to go, almost by instinct. I tore it off and flung it recklessly across the room, which had the unfortunate effect of summoning a swarm of medical personnel to my bedside. They spoke in the dulcet tones of consummate professionalism. They were part of the Interstellar Aid Relief Team, had set up a field hospital out of an old school. Apparently, most of the people they brought in had been so badly injured that their organs ceased to even vaguely resemble human anatomy. Plasma, napalm, crushed limbs, one man had jumped on a cluster munition to attempt to save his friends, phosphorous, corrosive gas. The doctor listed off the injuries he'd seen enthusiastically, energetically. I was lucky, he said, to escape from the cockpit of a war machine with only shattered legs, malnutrition, and minor brain damage. I'd been out for two days, apparently, and yet no one from my squadron had come to claim me, not even to harvest for organs.
It took two days for me to stop feeling dizzy, another three days for my limbs to no longer feel weak, another week to be able to walk. I limped out the front door as soon as I could, with a pack of rations, a water canteen, binoculars, a radio, and a small PDW. They were also kind enough to give me a awful, slightly itchy winter coat. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. The first day of travel was uneventful. The conditions were rough, but familiar. I'd survived, hell, thrived in worse. I remember back when I was a guerilla fighter, before the UNEA managed to recruit me. 90% of it was trudging through mud and sleeping in bushes, waking up covered in thistles and mosquito bites. I almost miss it. Almost. The second was bitingly cold, and punctuated by gunshots from the north. I was grateful for the meager shelter of a small hut I stumbled across. The third was when it began to snow, cloying and damp and sticky. The worst fucking kind. The fourth was when I made it to a small outcropping overlooking the squadron base, and saw - an exact replica of my machine, Gyre, down to the precise placements of the decals and the custom livery I had hand-painted. I tuned my radio to the encrypted frequency only squadron members knew, and - and waited. It was dead quiet, absent of even the chatter I'd come to expect. Then again, I only checked the channel during a sortie. About a half hour later, and the door from the dorms opened. Out streamed my squadron - the captains and the lieutenants, the ones I liked and the ones I didn't. Among them, an unfamiliar woman, tall and concerningly thin, with pale skin and narrow cheekbones. It took a few seconds of close observation before I was able to determine that - it was me. Me exactly, even. I didn't look in the mirror that often, but she seemed... spot-on to what I'd remembered last time. She was - beautiful. Do I really look like that???? The crew climbed into their cockpits, and one by one, took their place on the telecoms. The cacophony of voices grew fuller and fuller and fuller, until there was only one voice missing - mine. Then -
"This is Coriolis, reporting all greens. We're good to go."
Her voice was confident and clear, clearer than mine had ever been, but still tinged with the same hoarseness characteristic of those shitty replacement vocalizers I had. It was so shocking to hear that I almost didn't notice that she reported using my callsign. Well, that shoots down any plans I had of just... walking in the front door. She, alongside the rest of the squadron, leapt into the air. I kept listening to the radio, hearing not-me banter with the rest of the squadron as I always did, listening to her callouts and data relays. Eventually, they disappeared over the horizon, and the radio stream grew more and more staticky before eventually cutting out altogether. I nestled comfortably between the roots of the tree I was near, and despite the cold, I slowly fell asleep.
I woke up at sundown to the sound of sonic booms and the smell of burning jet fuel. A few minutes later, and all the closeout procedures were complete. The crew streamed back in to their dorms to attend debriefing, and then 'turn in for the night', which usually meant heading to a local bar and absolutely wrecking the place with utterly no consequences. I, of course, usually stayed in, and usually either paced mindlessly or read. Nothing better to do on a planet that wants to kill you.
I stalked carefully through the dormitory halls. It was a cheap building, drywall and linoleum filling out a concrete box. The sand in the concrete was probably the only thing harvested on-world, if only because sand's a bitch to transport. The walls were covered in grafitti and posters, layered on top of each other until the drywall only peeked through. The building reeked - of sweat, of antiseptics, of that faint metallic tang of new augments offgassing. I'd got in through a small hole in the fence, carefully staying in the blind spots of the security cameras. The code to the dormitories was, thankfully, the same as ever. I had just finished climbing up the first flight of stairs when -
"Why are you here?"
For a second, I thought I'd lost control of my vocal chords. I whipped around to find - me, or not-me, or whoever SHE was. Glaring at me, her-my gray eyes piercing me like a railgun round. She was me - exactly me. The small scar under my left eye. The faint line where the surgeon had cut my scalp. The iridescent ceramic of my prosthetic hand. The freckles that were everywhere but my face, on my hands, on my neck, on the upper part of my chest that peeked out from her-my gray ribbed tank-top, my favorite. She walked closer, carefully, step-by-step. I blinked furiously.
"Better question - who the FUCK are you?!" I attempted a controlled tone of voice and utterly failed.
"Quiet - there's still guards here -"
She pinned me against the wall, placed a hand over my mouth. Her skin was warm and soft, her touch gentle. So, definitely not an android. I took a deep breath through my nose, closed my eyes for a second.
"Have you calmed down enough to not shout?" Despite her words, her tone was surprisingly warm, almost affectionate. I nodded, blinked affirmatively.
"Okay." She let go of my mouth, grabbed my right hand. "Let's go to our room, we can talk there."
Our - my room was the same as always, a pathetically small box with a bare-minimum bed and a fibreboard desk nestled in the corner. The same posters, the same carpet I'd scavenged from a burnt-out house, the same ancient computer on the desk. Either she wanted to maintain her disguise, or she happened to have the same interests as me - Or she just doesn't care. I sat on the bed at her invitation, she sat next to me before scooting closer.
"So - why are you here? Do you WANT to get killed?"
"What? The better question is A - who are you? and B - why are you here?"
She looked slightly confused.
"Do you really not know?" I shook my head lamely, which earned a deep, sad sigh.
"In two weeks, you're going to die. So is everyone in the squadron. A suicide mission on some stupid corpo fortress. I thought they'd already begun to hype it up." And then I remembered something dimly, from those useless 'tactical briefings' we were forced to attend. The 'pinnacle' of our assault campaign. I gestured for her to go on.
"I'm here to save your life. I can get out of there - you can't. There's a reason I attacked you earlier, y'know." What? She chuckled faintly at my amused expression.
"Lovely. Now who are you?"
She kneaded her face with her hands, prodded and stretched her skin the same way I did, the same way I always did. I felt a flush in my cheeks, a buzzing in my mind. What is happening to me?
"I'm you." She said simply.
"Explain."
"You know how every time you get in the cockpit, they scan your brain and body completely?" I didn't, actually, but I nodded along anyways -
"You know that stupid fucking system they always talk about? The one that gives tactical orders and tells the commanders to tell you to go do dumbfuck things?" I did know, this time. I wasn't quite sure if it actually existed or was just an excuse to justify the higher-ups commands. I never got to hear it speak, never got to talk to it, never even got to see its console. None of us did. The closest I ever got to knowing it was when I asked the systems operator, Kei, to put in a nice word for me, half as a joke. She'd returned that night with an odd expression, eyed me as if she'd seen a ghost. I miss her.
"It decided you were worth keeping around. Thought you were interesting. It- she's kind of nice actually." I didn't even know it was sentient.
"Anyway, it assembled an exact replica of me, you, whatever the fuck, molecule by molecule, down to the fucking neurons. Apparently it cost a fuckton of money." Realization dawned across my face.
"So, you're - "
"Yeah." Her right arm was wrapped around my shoulder and her left rested easily on my thigh, in EXACTLY the place I'd rest it, with exactly the right amount of pressure. And I thought - Actually, what the fuck is wrong with me?
She looked at my expression, chuckled.
"You know, I think I know exactly what you're thinking."
What was I thinking? I suddenly didn't know.
"And what, pray tell, would that be?"
And then she leaned in and locked her lips with mine, a gentle intercept, like a mid-air refueling more than a hard landing. I jerked away, slightly shocked. Red spread across her-my cheeks like a wildfire.
"Oh, did I get that wrong? Sorry, I - "
The tone was familiar, the same one I used after making a dire mistake. Fuck. I practically lunged at her, like a predator after its prey. Our lips clash, awkwardly at first (I misjudged the angle of our noses), then smoothly, as if they were molded for each other. For a second, her eyes were open wide, tracking my facial movements precisely, then gradually her lids fell in sync with mine. Dark, perfect, comfortable. We fell into each other perfectly, hands tracing our shared body, mirroring each other almost robotically - our movements already traced and planned out like the whirling of planets. She broke apart from me reluctantly.
"Called it." Her voice was sing-songy, triumphant.
"You need to go - now. I'll see you in 3 weeks. Go here - " she handed me a navigation device with a position marker programmed into it - "and don't tell anyone you're a pilot."
"But - "
"No buts."
